[...] relocating political (and economic) decisions to the 'legal' level is an effective way of removing them from popular control. This has made the juridical sphere the perfect vessel for the implementation of austerity politics. By mandating austerity at a legal level, economic decisions can to be [sic] moved - both substantively and ideologically - from the sphere of political contestation into the realm of technocratic necessity.

One final feature of the law is of particular importance here. Lawmaking is - as Karl Klare puts it in 'Law-Making as Praxis' - 'constitutive'. That is to say that law, in creating a system of material and ideological compulsions and incentives, plays a key role in shaping and transforming political terrain. This is the ultimate aim of juridicalised austerity. By creating a system of incentives, the legal framework of austerity ultimately forces 'progressive' governments into implementing austerity on their own.

[...] the IMF's legal framework proved the perfect vehicle for the creation of austerity. The IMF, as a legal creation standing above states, is able to impose a set of policy choices from above. These policies are couched as legal obligations, which bind the recipient state. In this way, in a very real sense, the IMF - as a body entirely inaccessible to popular mobilisation - removes economic choices from the possibility of popular control. At the same time, the IMF juridically frames austerity policies; treating them not as objects of class struggle, but simply as technocratic requirements of growth.

Thatcher's neoliberal project was not simply to limit public spending [...] in the case of local government, the aim was not just to force them into making spending cuts, but rather to create the environment in which they would be forced to choose to do so themselves. In that way, local governments would be transformed into 'austere subjects'. The aim was to make local government internalise austerity.

The Syriza example points us particularly to two decisive features of law-sterity. Firstly, by posing the situation as essentially 'radical break' or 'progressive austerity', it operates as a wedge with which to split the radical and moderate components of any political coalition, generally leaving the latter in power. Secondly, whilst 'progressive austerity' may be implemented under protest, one cannot implement such a regime without being fundamentally transformed. Such a government will - necessarily - become alienated from its base and continue to make compromises, eventually internalising the very logic of austerity (particularly as the more radical elements in its ranks are driven away). I this way, there is a double movement towards transforming progressive governments into austere subjects.

The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian schooled in Marx, is a struggle for the rough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual. Nevertheless these latter are present in the class struggle as something other than mere booty, which falls to the victor. They are present as confidence, as courage, as humor, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and they reach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon, call every victory which has ever been won by the rulers into question.

The arcades, and the culture of consumerism these ushered in, is identified here as prerequisite of fascism, which cannot be understood without reference to capitalism, both in terms of its economic basis and in the way in which people are encouraged to conceive themselves, against all reality, as consumers and national masses, not workers and internationalists. At the same time, the arcades and other similar nineteenth-Century forms, such as railway stations, museums, exhibition halls, fizz with utopian promise, the promise of luxuries, of mobility, of knowledge. Benjamin is always alert to a dialectical switch in which the contemporary 'hell' of commodity production and capitalist society can be probed to reveal traces of hope, prefigurations of a communist society, but this is also the forging ground of a consumerist mentality that feeds fascism and an aestheticisation that amplifies the cultivation of myth. This is the ground on which fascism thrives. It goes both ways. Choices are to be made.

Like that of Vico, Jewish history-telling is cyclically tragic. From Biblical Egypt to Weimar Germany, in our own narratives times of comfort and joy for Jews were always the augurs of misery to come – the higher the summit, the further the fall. In most of the world, we live now in good times. Anti-Semitism in the twenty-first-century Jewish imaginary is therefore located in the past and in the future, as spectral. Worries about anti-Semitism are almost universally anxieties about what happened long ago read as a warning about what might happen next. [...]
Such an approach licenses paranoia. [...] if fears are future-oriented – as in the case of anti-Semitism – no amount of material comfort and social respect for Jews can allay them. The better things get, the worse they might get. Clearly this is a route to madness, so its kernel of truth is troubling and frustrating. The narrative is not easily dismissed. It is true that times of Jewish security and prosperity have often summoned anti-Semitism, which tells us something important about the anti-Semitic worldview.

Like the Left, [...] the anti-Semite sees politics as a contest between oppressors and oppressed and claims to side resolutely with the latter. [...] anti-Semitism from slaves and the colonised reads Jews as the apex of whiteness, the highest kings of a European elite. It is, in the Nietzschean frame and in its deluded self-image, the lambs' revolt against birds of prey. [...] Such is the 'socialism of fools', but these examples are also designed to illustrate that there is nothing necessarily left-wing about purported anti-elitism. Today's tabloid attacks on 'union barons' ordering strikes to hurt 'ordinary people' ought to dispel that illusion. [...]

[...] Though Jewish embourgeoisement has been one story of the last century, anti-Semitism treats oppression as culturally explicable, which is to say it roots injustice in the ethnic deformity and personal villainy of a minority rather than in the structurally ingrained logic of social relations motoring hierarchical societies. Its construction of fantasy Jews reads political interests as intractably biologically or culturally determined, where the left instead takes social positions of power and powerlessness as the ultimate arbiters of interests and so (by its belief in the possibility of human transformation through changing one's condition, by treating the final problem as power and not people) holds out the prospect of genuinely universal salvation inconceivable to the anti-Semitic mind. [...] They thus foreclose the possibility of universal emancipation from oppression by thinking some are permanently damned by their deformities and/or by limiting political aspiration to cultural purification, seeking to change the colour of our chains rather than breaking the chains altogether. [...]

Finally, anti-Semitism, like all conspiracy theorising, is ultimately about providing comfortable reassurance. It tells the anti-Semite that the problems in her society do not really run very deep, that they are only the work of some small cancer to be zapped while leaving a healthy body intact. It is a mechanism for defending the fundamental rudiments of the existing social order as they come under strain. Far from merely peripheral fanaticism, anti-Semitism on this reading has always held a central place in the everyday political thought of the West: rescuing the image of civilisation by identifying its problems as really alien to it.